SEO for home service businesses, ranked by what actually works

We do not sell SEO packages, which makes this easier to write. Nothing below is a pitch for a retainer. Most of it is free, most of it you can do yourself in an afternoon, and the order matters more than the list.

1. Your Google Business Profile

Free. Bigger than everything else combined.

When somebody searches “plumber near me”, the map results at the top come from Google Business Profiles, not websites. Those three listings get the overwhelming majority of the clicks. If you do one thing, do this.

Claim it, then fill in every field:

• Exact business name, no keyword stuffing. “Hollis Painting” not “Hollis Painting Greenville Best Painters SC”. Stuffing gets listings suspended.
• Precise categories. Primary category carries the most weight, so pick the most specific accurate one.
• Service area, listed as the towns you actually drive to.
• Hours, including holidays.
• Real photos, added regularly. Profiles with recent photos perform better.
• Every service you offer, listed individually.

Then keep it alive. Post occasionally, answer questions, add photos. A profile updated this month outranks one untouched since 2023.

2. Reviews

Free. The second biggest factor, and the hardest.

Reviews affect both where you rank in the map results and whether anyone calls once they see you. A four-star business with sixty reviews beats a five-star with four almost every time, because volume reads as real.

What works:

• Ask every satisfied customer, at the moment the job is done and they are happy
• Send a direct link to the review form, not instructions
• Reply to all of them, good and bad, because Google notices and so do customers
• Never buy them. Google catches it and the penalty is worse than the problem

Answering a bad review calmly does more for you than the review costs. Prospective customers read the response more carefully than the complaint.

3. Speed on a phone

Costs whatever your site costs. Affects rankings and revenue.

Your customer is standing in a yard with one bar of signal deciding who to call. If your site takes six seconds to open, a meaningful share of them leave before it does.

Google uses page speed as a ranking factor, but the conversion effect is larger than the ranking effect. Test yours on PageSpeed Insights. If mobile scores below fifty, that is your problem.

Two causes account for nearly all of it. The first is huge unoptimized images, straight off a phone at four megabytes each, and you can fix that yourself in an afternoon. The second is harder: the platform itself. Every website builder ships its own machinery to your customer’s phone before your content loads, and a WordPress site running a page builder plus a dozen plugins is carrying a lot of weight that has nothing to do with painting or roofing.

That is the main reason we hand-build sites in code instead of using a builder. There is no editor, no theme engine and no plugin stack to download, so the page arrives with your content and nothing else. You cannot out-optimize a platform’s baseline, which is why this one is difficult to fix without rebuilding.

4. A page for each service and each town

The main thing your website itself contributes.

Most contractor sites have one Services page listing eight things. That page competes for eight different searches and wins none, because somebody searching “cabinet painting” lands on a general page and leaves.

Give each real service its own page with a few hundred honest words. Same for each town you serve, if you can say something genuinely specific about each. A page that just swaps the town name into identical text is a doorway page and Google treats it as spam, so only build the ones you can write properly.

5. Consistent business details

Free. Boring. Matters.

Your name, address and phone number should be identical everywhere: your site, your Business Profile, Facebook, Yelp, the chamber directory. Google cross-references these to decide you are real. Three versions of your phone number across the web is a small, persistent drag.

Pick a canonical format and fix the mismatches once.

6. Being listed in the obvious places

Mostly free.

Yelp, Angi, Nextdoor, BBB, your chamber, your trade association. Each is a link and a corroborating record. You do not need fifty. You need the handful people in your town actually use.

7. Content, eventually

Real work. Slow. Genuinely compounds.

Answering real customer questions in writing does work. It is also the slowest item here and the one most often sold before the earlier six are done.

If your Business Profile is half filled in and you have nine reviews, writing blog posts is the wrong move. Fix the top of this list first. If everything above is handled and you want to keep going, write the questions you answer on the phone every week.

What does not work

Meta keywords. Dead for twenty years. Still sold.

Keyword density. Writing “Greenville roofer” eleven times reads badly to people and does nothing for Google.

Buying links. Against the guidelines, occasionally catastrophic, and the cheap ones come from sites nobody reads.

Blogging daily. Volume without substance is actively harmful now. Google’s helpful content system specifically targets mass-produced pages.

Submitting to 500 directories. An automated blast to directories nobody visits. At best worthless.

Ranking reports as a service. Any agency can produce a chart showing improvement by choosing which keywords to report. Judge on calls, not charts.

An honest order of operations

If you have a weekend:

1. Claim and completely fill in your Google Business Profile
2. Set up a system for asking every customer for a review
3. Test your site on PageSpeed Insights and fix the images
4. Split your Services page into one page per service
5. Make your business details consistent across the web
6. Claim the five directories that matter in your town

That is most of local SEO for a home service business. It costs nothing but time, and it outperforms most retainers we have seen contractors pay for.

Items 1, 2, 5 and 6 are yours, and you should not pay anyone a monthly fee to do them. They are an afternoon of work and nobody can do them better than the owner.

Items 3 and 4 are the website, and they are the two most people cannot fix on their own. Speed is capped by the platform you are on, and splitting one Services page into a real page per service means writing all of them.

That is the part we do. We hand-build so the site is fast by construction rather than by optimization, and we write the service and town pages for you from real research rather than handing you a blank template and wishing you luck. We build the whole thing before you pay anything, so you can run your own PageSpeed test on the finished site and compare it against what you have now. If it is not faster, you have lost nothing.